


Smiles Are Made Of Accolades (that don't belong to me)

by Clarice Chiara Sorcha (claricechiarasorcha)



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Post-TDW, Sibling Incest, post-AoU, semi-explicit mentions of a het pairing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-21
Updated: 2015-12-21
Packaged: 2018-05-08 04:23:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5483177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/claricechiarasorcha/pseuds/Clarice%20Chiara%20Sorcha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the <a href="http://stuckythorki.tumblr.com/SecretSanta">Stucky/Thorki Secret Santa 2015</a>:</p>
<p>Thrones are made for kings. Everything else is just make-believe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Smiles Are Made Of Accolades (that don't belong to me)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [izazov](https://archiveofourown.org/users/izazov/gifts).



A long silence falls between them. He measures its cadence by his own footfall, gnarled hands clasped at the small of his back. Though long accustomed to pageantry and performance, this guise of an old man grates at his natural ease of movement. The conversation itself would almost be a welcome distraction – if not for its subject.

“You know I cannot condone such a union,” he says, finally. Even now, it startles him: hearing the voice of his father from between his lips. Loki cannot quite mask his grimace, except by adding, “King or no.”

Thor hums a moment, strangely thoughtful. “King or no,” he echoes, and then his gaze flits sideways; the blue catches the sun, glints oddly green. Then he looks back, a lopsided smile upon his great fool face. “I understand.”

In a stupid way, Loki actually believes him. “She is brilliant.” The words slip out even as he wonders at whether Odin himself would grant such a concession. He has inhabited the man’s skin for months, known him for his own entire lifetime, and still the old man’s mind remains a shuttered mystery even to him. “And she _is_ beautiful. But it is not to be.”

That quiet returns, again, unbroken save for their footsteps upon the path – and the throaty chatter of Huginn and Muninn. The birds dance along the balustrade beside them, dark eyes aglint with watchful mockery. Fortunately Thor had never had the patience to learn their speech, and neither had they the will to indulge him in long lessons. They are creatures of Odin before they are of the king; yet they follow Loki willingly, dislocated shadows full of laughter and sly wisdom.

He often wishes he hadn’t learned their cursed tongue.

“Who should stand at the side of the king?” Loki asks sudden, and abrupt; it is so easy to fall into the didactic tone Odin had so often used to them as children. Reflexively, Thor answers with an easy obedience rarely seen beyond his earliest years.

“His queen,” he says, though his brow has furrowed, steps slowing. Loki stops three or four steps ahead, turns back. The golden hair glints in the sunlight. Frigga’s hair had been the same very shade, once. And Thor sighs, as if he himself had the same thought.

“But I desire no queen.”

His own head is silvered and grey – and so very black beneath. “A king cannot rule alone.”

Again, Thor’s eyes skip sideways: across the training yards, and then over even the city itself. “I did not say I wished to.”

The unspoken words leave a bitter taste upon his tongue: Jane Foster will be the ruin of him. Iðunn will permit no mortal her golden apples, and while there are artefacts in the Nine Realms and beyond that will grant even a mortal her godhead, the astrophysicist has no interest in politics or interplanetary diplomacy. It is not her place. And yet Thor would raise her to dizzying position without thought to duty or due place, and scorn all who would favour rationale over lust.

There is more to say, but Loki does not know how to say it. The simple truth is that Thor would not listen to even his real father in this, let alone a tired facsimile of the same. Their conversation stumbles along for some time further, though both wordlessly acknowledge it had truly ended there. When Thor takes his leave, he does not return to his chambers. Loki does not need to watch to know he rides instead for the Observatory, his horse’s hooves thunderous upon the rainbow bridge as he races home to her.

This is not why he took the throne. There are things he must do. And yet still Loki sits upon the golden seat and opens his eyes to the realms beyond Asgard for reasons entirely his own, not fit for any true king of even the meanest of lands.

He cannot help but watch their reunion. The Foster woman is a flame amongst embers; it is no wonder Thor would be drawn to her. And yet she is so unlike his other conquests of past, both recent and not. There had been many a passing fancy: buxom wenches for the most part, happy to take their tumble with a crown prince and then kiss him goodbye come morning. Few had held his interest for long.

Only Sif had struck Loki as any true threat. She seemed everything that would matter to Thor: her determination, her strength, her skill with blade and tongue, her undeniable beauty and wit. In her Thor would find the perfect companion. Loki had always known Thor would marry. He had not realised how much it would hurt to watch it happen.

Their words have long since dissolved into touch, and tease. It goes without saying that Loki should look away now – should have looked away long ago. A good man would realise this moment is private. Loki is not a good man. But then it seems he has no self-preservation, besides – because it _hurts_ , to see him lay his hands upon her.

This is not a Thor he knows. Oh, he’s heard enough, through tent flaps and tavern walls, to know something of how his older brother is about his conquests. This does not match past experience. Thor instead undresses Jane with a quiet reverence, lips trailing behind fingertips; his clever tongue wrings from her release once, twice, before he has even stripped off his shirt.

And when he does, still Loki cannot bear to let the vision go. Still dazed from her own pleasure, Jane reaches for him with frank eagerness; her small hands can barely cover his length, even as she bends her head to gently lay lips upon its thick head. Thor allows it but a moment; then he is lifting her, laying her gentle upon the bed, rising over her like the morning sun.

Loki does not watch, then. But neither does he banish the image. Rather, he stares sightless across the empty throneroom and listens until her little cries reach a crescendo, until his quickening breath ends in a shuddering gasp, lips pressed to pale skin, hands cradling a head of dark hair.

“ _I love you_.”

One sharp, clumsy wave of a hand, and it is extinguished to nothing. Loki does not need to watch, to listen any longer. He’s known since childhood how the fairytales end for the heroes. For the villains.

And for the monsters.

 

*****

              

“I have a boon to ask of you.”

The throne is cold beneath him, and hard. If but his words could have the same qualities. Instead, they are little more than weary. “I cannot give you the blessing of Asgard over any marriage to Jane Foster.” His tongue feels raw, clumsy about his speech though he cannot stop its empty flapping. “Nor can I grant her the titles of consort or future queen. Should you go through with this, then she will be but a common law wife, and both she and any children she produces will be unrecognised by the court and the crown.”

A small line has appeared upon Thor’s brow, bisecting it but shallowly. “That is not what I wish to ask of you.”

The lurch of his stomach mirrors the sensation he’d so often felt when very small, and he realised his father had seen straight through some childish trick. But Loki wears the face of Odin himself now, and his own self shows not upon this mask of aged skin and old bones. “Oh.”

The flat syllable hangs heavy, a gibbeted man not quite dead upon his gallows: spinning and suffocating both at the end of a noose. Then Thor’s golden head bows downward, eyes upon the marbled golden floor. “May I approach Hliðskjálf?”

Loki inclines his own head, though he wishes he might do otherwise. But then, Odin has no reason to turn his eldest son away. This is the one forgiven of all treason and trespass, after all.

They still feel such strange words upon his borrowed lips. “What do you wish of me, my son?”

Thor holds his place at the foot of the stairs, but turns his gaze upwards. His eyes are pure stormfire, plasma-blue and bright. “I offered you Mjölnir, once.”

The electric jolt of it sends a tremor through his own reply, rendering it the throaty croak of one of those damned ravens. “I have already told you she is yours to keep evermore.”

“I wish to give her over to your hand.”

Even kings might be dumbfounded. In this guise, Loki had only one eye with which to search Thor’s still, calm form. It proves hardly adequate to the task. “And why might that be?”

“It is something I must do.”

From the first day she had accepted him as her master, Thor had never allowed Mjölnir far from his sight. Even in his banishment, he had never strayed far from her side. Such slavish devotion had left Loki’s skin crawling, half-sick with jealousy. It had been hard enough to comprehend that Thor would willingly surrender her that day her had offered Mjölnir to Loki-as-Odin upon the throne, in the days after Svartálfaheimr. That he would now so casually leave her behind, a long-married wife he had tired of, sparked fury low in his gut. “I gave her into your care, Thor. She is not a toy to be discarded at some whim.”

“I realise that.” Without leave Thor rises from bent knee, ascends the stairs with a careless grace that should have been impossible upon one of his great size. The swiftness of it leaves Loki too stunned to even say he has not permission, let alone use Gungnir to stop him.

Thor is close enough to touch when he stops, tall and golden before the throne. With Loki still seated, he towers above him with all the gravitas of the gilded ancestral statues that encircle Asgard like a watchful honour guard. “Father,” he says, and Loki can but croak his reply.

“Thor.”

His brother answers only by holding Mjölnir to him: head upwards, shaft downwards, his own hand clasped tight just below the runed uru. Loki’s next movement is a mistake – but then he has made many mistakes. Even quiescent as she is, Mjölnir’s soft song cajoles him forward, a siren’s low welcome croon. Still seated upon the high throne of Asgard, Loki’s hand falls from Gungnir’s golden haft, closes about the leather just below Thor’s fingers. Still warm from Thor’s grip, it is soft and yielding. The faint hum of her bloodsong grows louder, low electric melody.

The weight of her is both featherlight, and the suffocating pressure of deepest ocean upon every inch of his borrowed skin. Holding her aloft by Thor’s hand leaves him feeling as though he stands upon a precipice, leaning out over the abyss all over again. Should Thor remove his hand, the illusion will be undone, and he will fall harder than even the first time.

Thor thrusts his hand upward, sudden and unspoken. Holding onto Mjölnir, Loki must let go, or go with her. Standing, trembling before the emptied hall, Loki is beneath while Mjölnir reigns triumphant high above. The cold storm-silver of Thor’s eyes lies upon him, and Loki knows that the illusion had shattered long ago.

But he does not move. He does not let go. And Thor stands yet before the throne, his hammer held high between them.

“Is this not what you wished for?” he says, so very quiet that for a moment Loki does not even register the words as real. And then colour flushes his cheeks, hot and shameful; he can barely choke out even the single word he manages.

“What?”

“Mother is not the only one who saw your illusions.”

His fingers reflexively tighten about Mjölnir’s worked leather. “Let me go,” he chokes out, though Thor has no physical hold over him. But then, Thor has not won all of their battles since Loki’s fall by strength of arm alone.

Without a word Thor lets go – of Mjölnir. The hammer hits the floor first, and Loki but a moment afterwards. On his knees, bent forward, the pain hits him hard and hot; it sizzles up the awkward curve of his arm with white lightning-fire. When he bites his tongue to keep from crying out, he tastes salt, harsh iron. He knows the illusion is gone, that he crouches before his brother in his own cursed Aesir skin, but he does not look up. And his fingers, bruised and aching, only hold tighter yet.

“Still you will not let her go.”

The observation is low, somehow pitying. No other tone might have induced Loki to his next action. “ _Bastard_!”

He strikes like a serpent from the ground. The speed of it might be quicker than most, but then Thor has known Loki’s battleform since the very beginning. Though Loki hits low, with considerable force from his coiled position, the relaxation of his great body cushions Thor. It gives him time enough grasp Loki with bruising force before sending them both crashing down together, rolling over and over in a tangle of limbs. The sensation invokes a strange memory of distant childhood. Perhaps that is why, rather than falling into the muscle memory of wrestling lessons learned long ago, Loki goes back to the very first of his inbred defences.

Thor lurches back, hand held to his chest, eyes comically wide. “You _bit_ me!”

“Well.” On hands and knees Loki clacks his teeth together in harsh parody of laughter. Then he simply bares them in a cold grin. “I _am_ the monster from beneath your bed.”

“No.” Throwing himself forward with the feline grace of a lion at hunt, Thor snatches him up by his shoulders; the swift attack startles Loki enough he forgets to react, feet dangling above the floor as Thor actually shakes him. “Loki. You are my little brother.”

Throwing his head back, Loki only laughs, and doesn’t care a whit that it bares the long column of his throat to the warrior before him. “You never were a particularly quick study, were you, Thor.”

“It takes a good teacher, for lessons such as these.”

He goes very cold, and very still. “What, like your precious Jane?”

“She taught me much, yes.”

“How to be weak, for one.”

The sneer is met with a bone-jarring shove backward. His spine hits the golden throne in a flash of white, and for a moment he thinks he might never move again. But then Thor stalks towards him, Mjölnir returned to his hand and again raised high. Scrambling for purchase upon the ridiculous ornate chair, Loki calls upon his own seiðr; Gungnir lies abandoned. Unlike his brother’s weapon, the staff will not come when called. Loki has only himself left now. One mistimed blast is easily deflected by the widest uru face; Loki scarcely has time for a snarl of disgust before Thor is upon him once more.

Mjölnir drops upon the seat of the throne with a mighty clang, one so close to thunder the sound trembles through bone, aches in his teeth. He also must scramble backward to avoid it crashing down upon the most sensitive part of his groin. Even with this crisis averted, when the shaft of the damnable thing falls backward it takes him low in the gut. Doubling over, he finds of course it cannot be moved. Even forced thus backward, it presses up from beneath, thrust into his diaphragm so that his breath comes pained and hard.

Arching backward, Loki grimaces, eyes clenched closed. They open only when he feels the drape of something thick and heavy about his shoulders.

“Well?” His brother is a golden blur before pained eyes, tall and broad and so bright as to block out the worlds entire. And his voice is a low roll of sweet thunder, oddly gentle for all his body feels as though he has fallen far, and hard. Then he speaks, again, and Loki wants to scream. “Is this not what you wanted?”

The fool’s cape is gone. Instead it now lies draped about the trembling tension of Loki’s own shoulders. He now sits again upon the throne, with Mjölnir between his thighs and his brother’s mantle wrapped about him. Scarlet and warm, like blood – and scented so strongly of his damnable brother it leaves his head spinning in lazy looping thoughts that have no sense or reason.

“Let me up,” he whispers, and Thor only sighs.

“No.”

Every inch of him hurts, and all he wishes to do now is lay his head down and pretend that the fact he lives yet is but a minor misstep. But then, he had done precisely that upon the Chitauri homeworld.

Struggling upright, Loki sets his jaw, bites down on the inside of his cheek. The taste of his own blood, Aesir-sweet and rich, is as a dose of adrenaline straight to his heart. “What do you want from me?” he snarls. “To grant you permission to marry that Midgardian whore? Then fine! Give me back Odin’s face and I will let you take her as queen and father a dozen half-breed whelps on her!” Baring his teeth, he grins mad and wide. “Though you must realise she probably won’t survive even the first clawing its way out between those narrow little boy-hips of hers.”

He’d meant only to be cruel, to revel in the welcome viciousness of fraternal mockery turned deadly and cold. Yet the frantic edge had not passed Thor by. Not as it might have, once. “Loki,” he begins, but Loki cannot let it end this way.

“I’ll give you what you want!” One hand closes hard about Mjölnir’s haft, finds no pleasure in the thrum of her slumbering seiðr. “Just let me _go_!”

Thor is motionless, golden-haloed in the late afternoon sun. “I thought this is what you wanted.”

He wants to laugh. He doesn’t, but only because he fears he might cry instead. “Idiot.” Wheezing in enough breath to speak again, he spits out the next words as if they might condemn Thor, when he knows in his heart they only implicate one person. “This is what _they_ wanted.” And then, the next words, they escape his grasp like everything else he has ever wanted. “It’s not _me_. It was never _me_.”

Silence falls as a guillotine blade between them. And though Loki has kept his head this long, his thoughts are muddled and muddy, and his body flails as though his mind has indeed been severed clean away. Closing clumsy hands about the shaft, he pulls tight. Mjölnir does not move, does not even protest; he might as well have not touched her at all. The cloak slithers down, pooling around his hips in a pool of thick crimson. Loki lets go, and still feels the manacles of birth and circumstance closed tight about his aching throat.

“They want somebody grand, somebody noble, somebody beautiful and brave and bold.” He shakes his head, wishes it would just fall from his shoulders. “That is what they want.”

“What about what I want?”

Loki rolls his eyes sideways, aching and salt-riddled. “You already have everything you want.” His lips twist, bitter curl. “You always did.”

“I thought I did,” he corrects, almost gentle. “But then I lost the most important thing.”

From childhood Loki has learned the fine art of concealing a hundred blades upon his person. His fingers itch to pull one, two, three – to plunge each into the eyes and tongue of the man before him. And yet he only trembles, paralysed and undone before him. “Thor.”

There’s a plea in it, somewhere. Thor does not hear it – or if he does, he does not listen. “I was losing it for years,” he goes on. “And I didn’t even know until it had disappeared into the shadows I didn’t even know were there.”

“Thor. Please.” He bucks up, just once. Mjölnir holds him to the throne now, but then he knows it is not her fault. “Let me go.”

“And where will you go?”

He turns his head, cold skin upon the warmth of the golden throne. “I don’t know. Away. Away from here.”

“I don’t want you to go.”

His head snaps back. “ _Why_?” Fury rises now, littered with disbelief. “All I’ve done is ruin your life.”

It infuriates him, to see those great shoulders move in a shrug; a cruel prank, years of wanton destruction and betrayal, and now the fool acts as if it hardly matters a whit. “Not always,” he says, and Loki knows he cannot ever accept the forgiveness he has craved since even before this began.

“You’re an idiot.”

“I realise that.”

A token struggle is all he can offer his own dignity. It is as paltry as it is pointless. By word and deed and utter foolish sentiment he is now bound to a throne he had never even wanted for himself in the first place. Though there is no-where left to go but down, Loki finds himself staring ever upward. The great vaulted ceilings arch above him in their mocking distance, the golden mosaic of sun and stars patterned in great swirling pattern.

The two great hands come down upon the arms of mighty Hliðskjálf. Thor himself leans down over him a moment later. With such nearness the heat of him becomes near unbearable; it feels as though he could swallow him whole and never notice the effort. But then he’s not the ravenous monster. He is the hero who will slay the beast. And Loki might laugh to know as much, if it hadn’t left him in such despair.

“If I lift her,” Thor says, fingers moving in slow caress over Mjölnir’s silver-ringed leather, “then I lose you.”

It is easier to smile than it is to weep. “You already have.”

“Loki.” His hand draws back, but he does not; his words are simple, only a statement of truth. “Loki, the silver-tongued liar.”

Tears spill over his cheeks, a hot hateful flow that he spits back at his damned brother. “I hate you.”

One hand rises, rests upon his cheek and neck: that old gesture, so unexpected it stings like a slap even as it cradles him like memories of a home long since lost. And his smile is soft, and so very sad. “I know.”

Loki cannot help but close his eyes, leaning into Thor’s touch the way a frozen man might seek even the faintest hint of hearth and home. The light kiss pressed upon his forehead feels a strange benediction. His lips part, but no words come to his silver tongue, now brittle and blackened. Only a strange keening sound emerges, choked and croaking. Thor moves with a gentle grace that could only have been learned at their mother’s knee; his lips move to one eyelid, then the other, leaving them damp with salt. Finally they close over his lips, capturing the cry.

Loki goes very still. When he opens his eyes, Thor is but a moment away; his wide blue eyes might as well fill the worlds entire. “What are you doing?” he whispers, and Mjölnir trembles like approaching brontide between them. Thor only sighs, his thumb moving in small circles upon Loki’s aching jaw.

“I would not ask you for Jane even did I believe you would grant me her.” The words make no logical sense; Loki can form no reply, for he cannot even understand what it is that he brother is saying. And still Thor speaks, the words quietly, softly spoken. “She is her own to give, for one. And we decided both that I am not the one who should receive what she might choose to offer.”

He swallows hard. Still his throat burns, dry and closed almost to suffocation. “What?”

“We said goodbye.” It is a gentle sorrow, accepted and acknowledged and tucked neatly away into a space beyond Loki’s ability to reach. “As you say: she taught me a lesson, and one long-deserved.” The too-blue eyes skip sideways; just for a moment, he is hers, and so very far away from him. Then he looks back, and it is just the two of them together. “But she is not the one who will shape me further,” Thor says, and his hands are too warm, too strong, the humid heat of storm-heated air. “There is only one who has ever held such lasting influence over me.”

Loki presses back, away, but there is nowhere left to go. “Thor, what are you doing?”

“Only what you desire of me.” For the first time, the faintest hint of uncertainty enters his voice; Loki’s abdomen twists and squirms to see it. It leaves Thor the strangest shade of vulnerable, the way he might have been as a child when given his first live blade. And his voice now is low, simple over its most brutal of questions.

“Do you desire me?”

“I…”

And when he smiles, it is crooked, faintly melancholy. “I felt you, watching us.” Loki’s skin turns clammy, cold: the way it had been when a frost giant ground the bones of his wrist together in the frozen circle of its grip. But Thor’s touch is warm, the touch of early morning summer through an opened window. And he sighs. “I do love her. It was easy to be with her.” Now he laughs, faint and rueful. “But then I have always preferred to do things the hard way.”

Loki’s eyes are wide, his throat aching with what is either trapped laughter, or a scream. “I’m your _brother_.”

“As I said,” he murmurs, “always the hard way.” Setting himself back, just a little, he cocks his head; he resembles his childhood self so very strongly Loki can barely stifle a cry. From the weary expression he wears, so aged compared to the youthful echo of his position, Thor is well aware of it. “But do we not have that in common? You would never believe me, without a fight.”

One hand curves down, presses upon the blue-black bruise already hard and painful upon his hip. Loki hisses out a sharp breath, and Thor’s kiss is all soft apology upon his cheek. Then his lips move to his ear, the breath charged electric heat as he whispers, “I had never thought to take the throne without you beside me.”

And Loki’s laughter is a harsh, cawing thing. “I’m _beneath_ you, idiot!”

Levering the great body forward, Thor shakes his head; there is exhaustion in every line of him, though his expression is terrifying in its fondness. “Only because you clawed your way down there first.”

“As if there was any way for me to go up!”

This time Thor moves so close, the long line of his body presses against Loki’s on. The heat of him burns, bright sun at the centre of his universe turned supernova. “But there is,” he says, his cock so hard between them even beneath his clothing. And when Loki closes his eyes, he can hear again the little cries of pleasure she had made, when he had moved into her small body. But then, she had only shared in his physical gifts. Loki would crawl inside and wear that skin and soul as armour, if only it would fit.

“I will not be your whore.”

“No.” His hands cradle Loki’s face, eyes open and strange in their simplicity. “But you can be my brother.”

“This is not what brothers do.”

“It is what _we_ do.” His smile has the sharp curve of a berserker’s black delight, and Loki’s stomach lurches – in anticipation, in fear, in dark bloodied pleasure, he cannot tell. “And that is all that matters. What we do.”

A shiver dances down his spine in electric burst. It hurts, and yet he misses it the moment it is gone – and how like his brother it is. Beautiful, golden, terrifying: _Thor_. A mad storm writ clean and clear in the body of a god.

When Loki smiles, it is broken and bleeding. “I never wanted the throne.”

The lips upon his speak of forgiveness beyond words. “I know.”

Thor steps back, but he does not go far. With his back turned upon the audience chamber, eyes upon his brother, Thor begins to slowly disrobe. The presence of him alone is a devastating thing. Beneath fine-worked leather and mail he is himself a masterpiece of flesh and bone: clear-skinned, muscles gliding like smooth fluid beneath. The dusting of pale hair is rendered golden in the burnished light of the great hall. With a strange fastidiousness Thor lays his clothing aside, folded and soldier-neat. Then, he stands before Loki, arms at his sides, broad face open, eyes clear and set.

“Will you have me, then?”

A strangled sob is all Loki might manage – in this, there can be no simple answer. Thor does not wait for one. He instead envelops his brother in his arms, Mjölnir between them a sudden throbbing electric burn. Scrambling, clawed fingers sinking purchase, Loki finds his hands tangled in the long fall of golden hair. His lips taste of ozone and scorched earth. So easy it is, to bite down and drink deep of that iron tang, as if it would prove the elixir of transmutation his bruised soul craves so deeply.

One hand delves between them. Loki can barely suppress the groan at the brush of it over his cock, but the sensation is fleeting. Thor instead curls his hand about Mjölnir; a moment later and she is thrust aside, clattering down the stairs. Loki can almost hear her screams of protest at such rough treatment. But he himself can already feel bruises and bites and bleeding furrows and he doesn’t care a bit for the war wounds of anybody else.

Thor tears at his clothing without finesse; he does the same in return, and perhaps revels in even such simple destruction. Still it takes too long to strip himself bare. He knows he is ruining his favoured clothing and doesn’t even care. The thought of seiðr does not even cross his mind. There would be no satisfaction using tricks, in this. Only in the rip and pull and shred does he find something that approaches that which he has never known before.

The throne should be cool beneath the bare skin of his buttocks. And it would be a kind of sacrilege, perhaps. But then Thor’s cloak is still there: cushioning and shielding the vulnerable curve of his spine from the hard lines of the seat’s back and sides. Then the great opened hands are beneath him, lifting him up, allowing his own thighs to slip beneath. Without conscious thought Loki opens his legs wide, tangles his wrists in a delicate knot at the nape of Thor’s bent neck. Even as his fingertips tangle in the sweat-damp hair, Loki hooks his ankles at the hollow of his arched back, locking the two of them together upon the throne of all Asgard.

For that moment, everything stops. Their breaths come ragged, harsh, almost uncertain – but they remain tangled and sure. Raising his face, flushed and burning, Loki finds he still might look out over the empty throne room. He could no more move his brother than he could the damned hammer. But he doesn’t want it. Thor’s face, buried in his neck, remains motionless; his breath puffs warm against his Aesir skin, the faint press of his teeth the scarcest warning of the beast beneath the princely mask worn over the true berseker beneath.

One hand stirs between them; it fists their cocks, path slicked already by the clear fluid leaking from their rounded heads. Ragged nails anchor in the thick muscle of his hunched shoulders and Loki lets out a keening sigh, half-blinded by rising pleasure.

But still the throne room stretches before him. No cheering crowds fill the hall; no supplicant courtiers line the wide central aisle; no companions stand with hands to heart and knees to the dizzying steps ever upward. There is nothing here but the weight of Thor upon him and the throne at his back – and the callused hand that presses them together. Such dizzying sensation is like falling deep into the dark even while surfacing, breathing enough oxygen to make his head spin. In this his lungs might as well be filled with water, though in turn he has never tasted air so sweet.

The roll of hips is sweet pressure and pleasure both; it would be so easy, to lose himself in endless rise and fall. But the other hand has moved, curling behind him. Blunt fingers search out between his cheeks; Loki’s breath comes quick at the brush of a thick damp fingertip over his clenching hole. There is not enough lubricant, and he had not enough sense to whisper a spell to ease the way.

But then, it doesn’t matter that it hurts. He rather suspects it is supposed to. One finger presses inside, then two. Thor is murmuring nonsense all the while, the stuttered syllables matching the erratic pulse of his own heart. Seeking deeper, Thor presses theirs lips together as the questing fingertips at last brush their callused tips over the most sensitive of places inside his brother’s stilled body.

Loki comes wordless, almost silent. Something deep in his heart screams itself to hoarseness all the same; his hips jerk forward, as if stuttering in electric shock, arsehole burning as the muscle clenches beyond the event horizon of outright pain.

He’s somewhere far distant when the fingers ease first gently out, and then slip between them. Only when Thor raises his hand, fingers sheened with the spend collected from the hollow of Loki’s abdomen, does he realise the world has not ended. His brother is smiling, thoughtful and thoughtless all at once, raising his fingers to smear it upon his lips. The pink tip of his tongue then licks it away, and his smile only grows ever broader.

Loki groans; it is another dawn, and he had not thought to last the darkest hours of night. Reaching between them, blind even with eyes wide open, he closes a hand about his brother’s hard cock and jerks him hard. Thor’s head rolls backward, throat bared and working furiously; the great convulsive swallows draw forth a rumbling groan from his chest, and it rolls about the chamber. The spill of white marks Loki, hot and harsh, as Loki has already marked Thor.

But Loki does not taste him, does not take even that much of Thor into his body. It hardly seems to matter, for Thor now lies upon him. He is too heavy. He has always been too heavy. Loki pushes at him, ineffective as the motion is. Even when Thor is gone, his shadow is a dark weight upon everything that his younger brother is, and will ever be.

“Get off me, you oaf.”

With his face buried in the crook of Loki’s neck, he ought to be inaudible. Somehow the single word manages to be as clear as any kingly proclamation. “No.”

Loki closes his eyes, but it makes no difference. “Thor.”

At first he says nothing at all. His breathing, slow and slowing further, is hot upon his skin. For a moment Loki wonders if the idiot has actually managed to fall asleep. Then his head shifts, the words whispered against the great vein of his throat. “You will leave me if I do,” he says, the voice of a tired little boy denied his favourite bedtime story. And Loki stares at the empty room, and wonders if he’d ever been young enough to believe in happy endings.

“Will I?” he asks, and the indolence intended falls flat upon the air. Thor shifts, sighs, but cannot remain silent.

“I don’t know.”

Long fingers move over the golden hair, damp and tangled; Loki’s pulling at it before he even realises what he had started. “You can’t bind me here.”

“I know,” Thor says, soft, and does not react to the pain of a sharp tug. Loki does it, again, and then lets go.

“Because I am bound to something else.” He chuckles, humourless, defeated. “To you.”

His brother chooses silence, again. But neither does he move, for all that beautiful body and its brilliant energy speak for him far better than words ever could. The throne presses up against Loki on all sides but one, claustrophobic and cold, and he braces his hands upon his brother’s broad chest. Perhaps now he is sleeping. But then Thor has never needed to dream in order to receive all which he desires.

“Thor?” he asks, not expecting any answer. And the great arms hold him tighter yet, the scent of him like earth after rainwater.

“I love you.”

His brother always did know how to best deliver the death-blow. Loki’s voice is thick, aching, bruised and bleeding both. “I know.”

“Good.”

Still Thor does not move. Loki’s fingers are tangled in the unravelling braids of his hair again, eyes upon the mosaic ceiling far above. The constellations of Asgard’s sky, high at the pinnacle of Yggdrasil itself, curve and dip through the great golden lattice. But the real stars lie beyond it, hidden and unseen. Not even the greatest artisans might have one equal the other. It is but pale echo, faint mirror.

“I can give you what you want,” Loki says, very soft. Thor shifts upon him, lips moving up over his jaw, whispering the words into his opened lips.

“And will you?”

Loki does not answer, not in words. Instead he reaches between them, grasps the rising hardness of his brother’s cock, and guides him to the space between his thighs that might be called home.

Perhaps it won’t be a lie if he doesn’t speak it out loud.


End file.
